Elite Education.
I received an article in my scholar email yesterday: The disadvantages of an elite education by William Deresiewicz, Associate Professor of English, Yale - and a controversial and pretty-high-profile book reviewer.Wait - before you put on your chainmail and shut the gates of your ears and heart I make a last appeal to invite you to do some soul searching with me. Like what we were told a couple of weeks ago, we need other people to tell us what our inadequacies are, it is not going to be comfortable and it will hurt, and it would be up to us to differentiate between the true prophet and the false one...
'The first disadvantage of an elite education ... is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you.'
In order to talk to people who aren't like me, I have to be able to think like them. Can I do that?
I have tried before. I will keep trying. It is a matter of whether I can humble myself enough so that I can listen to what others say and feel what others feel, and to move further out of my comfort zone. I ought to try doing some community service regularly - I will keep my fingers crossed now first, but I should whenever possible.
This is not a matter of class. It is a matter of whether I can relate to people effectively who have different backgrounds and different values, even though we might come from the same secondary school, university or scholarship board. When I do not understand why some people do and say certain things or hold certain attitudes, I have more often than not failed to stop and reflect why don't I understand before rebuking, surrendering, or evading altogether.
I should ask more of those questions - approach and understand people - and learn to think like them. I won't have to become them - but at least I understand where they come from, and I won't think - I am better.
'The second disadvantage, implicit in what I’ve been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth.'
Extremely true - I am always telling people about the great things about my education, how amazing Hopkins is despite the extreme competitiveness...
And I do comparisons - I have to admit, those add to my self-worth and pride. And it creates misunderstandings and injures relationships, because I don't like people challenging me, or people to stand above me.
Must tell myself - I am not necessarily better. I shouldn't feel attacked (and react as such) when people challenge me, neither should I go and attack people whom I think hold views that are unagreeable to me - instead, I should, approach and understand them. I will always have to stand on my ground firmly - but I shouldn't base that on the defence of my self-worth!
'One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense.'
How afraid we are when we think we have blown a test; how bad we feel when we think that we have not learnt enough; how messed up we are when we feel that we are not up to expectation. What the author is setting us to think about is - does meeting expectations make us better people? Are we seeking the truth here when we are worried to the depth of our hearts about our grades?
We have practical expectations to meet, thus of course we have to do our best, but do we have to worry about them - and be upset at self and others because of these etc.? I am learning to see these more lightly already, hopefully you can too...
'But if you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual.'
This is the most obvious - and I don't even have to think too much on this before commenting. We should be learning critical thinking from our schools, not learning how to answer MCQs and then calculating curves. MCQs, from my experience, do not teach you anything else other than answering them, and when you don't know what to do with them, they teach you how to trust your pencil.
I find humanities essays rather helpful in this in some sense, because we are forced to learn how to form our own argument, substantiate them with evidences and consider the fallacies of our argument, but then in order for them to be helpful I cannot see them as 'A'-generating machines. The few (one or two?) science essays are dreadfully hard to do, but it is also a rewarding experience. These are risks that I took, and I am glad that I took them.
Moving further out of our comfort zones - to be humble - to put my self-worth aside and to approach, accept and understand - to be able to both succeed and fail - to be able to take more risks - I guess, at this point of my life, I have to have all these qualities, which I am still lacking...
Labels: Life, Philosophy and Religion
